Office of the Independent Blogger

The Sunday Times (online!) is running an article today about the chilly reception given Barack Obama by black activists such as Jesse Jackson. Is it any surprise that Jesse Jackson wouldn’t like him? He’s half-white, and has a chance to win (by media consensus), which would turn Jesse Jackson into a historical footnote rather than a political pioneer. Same with Al Sharpton, who says that we must be careful with Obama because we “don’t know what he’s all about.”

Translation: he isn’t black enough. I love Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Also from across the pond comes this news.

George Bush is preparing to make a historic shift in his position on global warming when he makes his State of the Union speech later this month, say senior Downing Street officials.
Tony Blair hopes that the new stance by the United States will lead to a breakthrough in international talks on climate change and that the outlines of a successor treaty to the Kyoto agreement, the deal to curb emissions of greenhouse gases which expires in 2012, could now be thrashed out at the G8 summit in June.

The timetable may explain why Blair is so keen to remain in office until after the summit, with a deal on protecting the planet offering an appealing legacy with which to bow out of Number 10. Bush and Blair held private talks on climate change before Christmas, and there is a feeling that the US President will now agree a cap on emissions in the US, meaning that, for the first time, American industry and consumers would be expected to start conserving energy and curbing pollution. ‘We could now be seeing the beginning of a consensus on a post-Kyoto framework,’ said a source close to the prime minister. ‘President Bush is beginning to talk about more radical measures.’

The move will be seen as part of a wider repositioning of the Bush government after its comprehensive defeat in last autumn’s mid-term elections. A change of heart on the environment was signalled earlier this month when the US administration unexpectedly announced that polar bears were now an endangered species because their habitat in the US state of Alaska had suffered from melting ice sheets caused by global warming. The government is now required to act on threats to the bears’ survival. The EU has its own so-called cap and trade scheme, under which industries are given a quota of carbon dioxide emissions: if they exceed the limits, they must pay for extra credits that can be bought from cleaner industries - an incentive to firms to go green.

We’ll see what this turns out to be, but I’d be stunned if this happened. I urge you all, however, to keep his last State of the Union Address in mind. He pledged bold action on energy. Not fifteen minutes later, his communications directors were on the air saying that he didn’t necessarily mean it.

Be careful when snakes sound.
–Chinese proverb.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Outside Retort (Current Affairs).